In my game against Graycompany, his KB just mauled a small bombardment TF. I will include the CR below for those interested. Fortunately, he was one hex too far away for his Kates to use torpedos and I just got plastered with bombs. Thus my BBs are doing well, but two of my CAs got wrecked; amazingly I don't think one single ship will sink as the worst flood damage is on a DD and is only 60%.

The Louisville and Northampton have sys damage of 68 and 84 respectively. Northhamton will take the better part of a year even at Pearl or SF to repair (which is halfway around the world). The Louisville may be salvageable.

What would you do? Scuttle one or both and get one or two new CA/CLs in about 1.5 years or repair them?

what year/month is it? I would say if its before 4/42 then at least scuttle the Northampton to get an extra baltimore CA in late 43. If its after 4/42..then i would keep it

also consider the experience level of your ships. If the northampton has accumulated a decent war record and has high exp. then it might be worth keeping it, as i don't think the exp. carries over to respawn ships.

Ahhhhh....yet another reason why the respawn feature is utter nonsense. Can you just imagine this question arising IRL? Early in the war anything remotely repairable was repaired. Eg DDs USS Shaw, Cassin and Downes and BBs California and West Virginia...complete wrecks were rebuilt. Oh yeah, it only applies to cruisers and carriers! So, complete wrecks that come to mind are New Orleans, Marblehead (was old more than a wreck and in Respawnland is a Cleveland or Baltimore so scuttle it!!). That's right, do what one "gamer" openly braggs about and use all the Omaha class CLs as CV bait so that they get blown out of the water and "come back" as modern cruisers!

Sorry....ranting but one must admit it is stupid.

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Yammas from The Apo-Tiki Lounge. Future site of WITP AE benders! And then the s--t hit the fan

I'd repair them. I try to put myself into my real life counterpart's shoes. I don't think the Allies would have thought about scuttling a ship because a better one of the same name would arrive in 1.5 years. I'm sure they were probably wondering how they would get by without the ship for x months while it was being repaired.

1) Even scuttling you loose VPs (90% of the total) 2) Cruisers are repaired quite quickly on the West Coast (I use SF for BBs and CVs and Seattle for DDs and CL/CAs). A 90 dmg is back to operational in 4-5 months. 3) It's gamey if you can avoid it. As already stated before it would make no sense IRL.

In one game as Japan, my opponent sent the Saratoga to be sank to get a better CV later in the game (he had already lost Lex and Enterprise). Respawning should not be used as a game tactic, it's a remedy. Exploiting it alters the reason why it was put in place.

Ahhhhh....yet another reason why the respawn feature is utter nonsense. Can you just imagine this question arising IRL? Early in the war anything remotely repairable was repaired. Eg DDs USS Shaw, Cassin and Downes and BBs California and West Virginia...complete wrecks were rebuilt. Oh yeah, it only applies to cruisers and carriers! So, complete wrecks that come to mind are New Orleans, Marblehead (was old more than a wreck and in Respawnland is a Cleveland or Baltimore so scuttle it!!). That's right, do what one "gamer" openly braggs about and use all the Omaha class CLs as CV bait so that they get blown out of the water and "come back" as modern cruisers!

Sorry....ranting but one must admit it is stupid.

Surely you are aware, dear Ron, that only CAs are re-spawned, not CLs.

That said, I´d try to save the ships. Scuttling them gives the Japanese player VPs, and wouldn´t you *so* want to kick yourself in the posterior if those 40 or 80 VPs are *exactly* what your opponent needed to get Auto-Victory, or what prevented your Auto-Victory later in the game?

Well, prior to posting I was leaning toward scuttling Northampton and saving Louisville. Just for kicks I have posted a screen shot of Northamton.

Part of the reason I posted this thread in the first place was to point out that despite early threads about bomb hits over aggerating flotation damage, I think this shows that not to really be the case. The Northampton took 9 bomb hits and while the float damage might be a little high, it certainly isn't sinking the ship.

It does raise the question though of should the ship be scuttled or saved. In the game, saving the ship is relatively easy. Let it drift at two hexes per day back to port. Pump her out and the ship just has to spend a couple of months dodging subs while it makes its way back to PH. In RL, many other factors have to be weighed and considered.

1. Some ship, probably a DD, would have to undertake towing what is now essentially a floating piece of scrap metal at slow speed in a questionably hostile area, now about 120 miles off the coast of Cairn. There are only two functional DDs to escort the 2 BBs and all other damaged cruisers safely back to port. Would a RL commander utilize his DDs for that purpose?

2. Even if the ship were towed back to port, could it make enough headway on its own to make the very long journey back home. The ship can do 5 knots now, as flooding goes down, speed will go up, but the fires will do additional damage and speed will go back down. Probably the ship won't do better than 5 knots and sys damage may reach 90 before all is said and done. In RL what is the minimum speed a ship could do in the open sea and be capable of steerage?

3. Even if the ship could make the treck on its own, significant scarce escort ships would be needed to escort the wreck all the way south along the Oz coast, across the south pacific, then the long treck back north to PH or WC. These are escorts that are needed to hunt subs off OZ.

4. Repair yards are scarce as they are still full with BBs from Dec 7th being repaired and other ships being upgraded.

Given these facts, would a RL commander scuttle or repair this ship (rhetorical question)? IMO, there is no way a RL commander would save this ship. True, it is gamey to know that you get another ship if scuttle one, but what can you do. In RL commanders would have known that other cruisers were being built. IMO, in this case, you wouldn't put other important ships in danger to save it.

actually, there has been very little chatter about operations and results. In this case I decided to break radio silence because I figured there was very little Jimmy could actually learn that he didn't already know.

Ahhhhh....yet another reason why the respawn feature is utter nonsense. Can you just imagine this question arising IRL? Early in the war anything remotely repairable was repaired. Eg DDs USS Shaw, Cassin and Downes and BBs California and West Virginia...complete wrecks were rebuilt. Oh yeah, it only applies to cruisers and carriers! So, complete wrecks that come to mind are New Orleans, Marblehead (was old more than a wreck and in Respawnland is a Cleveland or Baltimore so scuttle it!!). That's right, do what one "gamer" openly braggs about and use all the Omaha class CLs as CV bait so that they get blown out of the water and "come back" as modern cruisers!

Sorry....ranting but one must admit it is stupid.

Surely you are aware, dear Ron, that only CAs are re-spawned, not CLs.

That said, I´d try to save the ships. Scuttling them gives the Japanese player VPs, and wouldn´t you *so* want to kick yourself in the posterior if those 40 or 80 VPs are *exactly* what your opponent needed to get Auto-Victory, or what prevented your Auto-Victory later in the game?

Last turn, I had an old Australian CL respawn.

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Harry Erwin "For a number to make sense in the game, someone has to calibrate it and program code. There are too many significant numbers that behave non-linearly to expect that. It's just a game. Enjoy it." herwin@btinternet.com

Before I even read Ron's comments, I would say try to save them both. Try to get them into port to get their flooding and fires down and then slowly get them to either Sydney or Auckland to get some sys points removed so you can get them to do over 10 knots (2 hexes per turn). I once had the Hornet get 94 sys just off of Cairns and eventually make it back to San Fran. It got there and the sys damage had improved by 5 points on the way.

I would not scuttle the CA's - you don't have to send them to the coasts to repair since they are only 35 durability and you can repair them to operational long before you will get them back. You have 3 repair yards close by that you can send them. Auckland, Sydney, and Melbourne are all capable of repairing a 35 durabiility ship - they are not big enough to repair CV's, but they are plenty big enough to repair the CA's.

I would save them - even if scuttling removed all VPs I would still save them. Look at it from the Allied point of view - they did not know that the US's ship production would be so plentiful that they could 'waste' ships and they would attempt to save any ship at all... Definately save it. Let it sit somewhere until the flooding / fire is gone then send him on a long trip home to the West Coast. Put her in drydock and forget about her.. In a year you'll have an extra ship.

Firstly, nobody who has ever played the Japs in this game would ever ask the question "do I scuttle?". As the japs, you can't afford to scuttle anything - ever. Even if you only use the cripple to decoy bombers away from the rest of your retreating TF, that 10% of points you lost saved you 100% of the points on the other ships KB would have sunk.

IRL the main interest in abandoning a ship (and often scuttling it) was saving its crew. For example a DD having 250 crew = the equivalent of 21 squads = 7 troops points... A BB will have 35 troop points of crew or more, a CV up to 70 troops points... so depending of the ship points saved for scuttling should be between 50 and 25% of the VP total.

There were some cases (Yorktown at Midway, Houston off Formosa) where ships were abandonned by most of the crew and only a repair crew remained aboard the ship being towed to safety. But in most of the cases the 'abandon ship' order was followed by orders to scuttle it. The idea behind the scuttling being that it wasn't worth risking other ships to save a wreck.

By the way, to tow a cruiser you need another cruiser, a DD won't be able to tow a CA anywhere. So any "cripple" TF should have at least as many undamaged capital ships as there are crippled ones... and then you have to add DD escorts.

Amiral Laurent, those are my thoughts as well. I think a commander, in this case would marshal his assets toward saving the ships are crews that had the greatest chance of survival and not risk too much to save those that are in a very questionable state.